story - part 33 - magic - 1266 words

The way Altair tells her story, she was merely young and curious. The way the priests say it, the way the King and the Queen and all the people murmur her name, she was never anything but malicious and dangerous, a criminal at heart. I try to accept a truth somewhere between the two; I try to give her some benefit of the doubt. Perhaps because she is my mother. Perhaps because no one else ever has.

She, like me, was the less desirable choice between two possible heirs. The elder of two children, but she was female, and while this society likes to pretend that there is some kind of equality between the sexes, everyone has a chance, they always end up leaning toward the men. Their feet are more stably on the ground, their heads are less in the clouds.

Corbin, her brother, was born when she was three - some say that this was when her temperament changed, when she went from a sweet faced young girl to a spoiled brat of a princess. She sensed that something in the air, she knew that people were paying more attention to him than her, so she went out of her way to fix that. She threw temper tantrums, she made scenes.

It only got worse as she grew older. She would sit and pout at court events, throw food at fancy dinners, refuse to speak to common folk. Her nose grew farther into the air, her tricks sharper and nastier. She put her young brother out in the cold, or convinced him to try putting his hand on the stove, or smilingly told him that no one loved him and teased him until he cried. No amount of punishment could make her stop, nor long talks about the difference between right and wrong. They could not coax away that jealousy.

They sent her away before she hit puberty. Like me, she came into her room to find that everything was packed up and was ushered away into a carriage, a long journey to the religious capital. Publicly, their hope was that the priests would be able to show her the light, to bring some sense to her. Privately, perhaps, they just wanted to get rid of her.

It did not help. With no younger brother to pick on, no court to order around, no nannies to traumatize or court events to ruin, she was left with too much free time. The priests taught her lessons in humility, they taught her how to school in her emotions - and she feigned interest, pretending to learn control, while in the background she dug up dangerous and illegal books.

Magic has been forbidden for over a century. The tomes have been carefully hidden, tucked away into hidden rooms and back shelves, scattered so that no one person has them in his control. Somehow, she managed to find them, to dig up half a dozen or more volumes. Enough to learn more than anyone ever had, to cause real trouble.

The fact that she needed blood did not phase her. She started small, pricking her finger or catching small animals, performing small and simple spells. Dragging something across the room and into her hand was one of her favorites, as was making feathers and quills and other small objects float. She relished the control it gave her, and she relished the fact that no one else knew she could do it.

She should have stopped, when she hit puberty, when the first blossoms of feathers began to sprout. Instead, she grew more fascinated with it, she began to work her way up toward more complicated spells. No longer did she sacrifice baby birds but foxes, wolves, other animals that were hard to catch, wild and free. She learned to put simple orders into simple and unfocused minds, to bend servants to her will.

She was still young, though, a girl in an awkward and uncomfortable body, as she puts it. Too flat, with hips that were too straight and hair that was too curly, with a chin far too pointed, with long hands that she did not see as elegant but as spindly, ancient. She did not think herself beautiful, and she assumed no one else ever would.

So when this warped and amoral creature developed a simple crush on a young man, someone older and wiser, it did not take on the form of a giggling schoolgirl or a simple child. When he seemed utterly uninterested, when he was unable to read her mind and he did not coming running to catch her up in his arms, it took on a more dangerous edge. Her pride was injured, whether he knew it or not.

Wolves were not enough, nor any other animals, no matter how wild and free. Her goal was control, complete control, coaxing him into her hands so that he could do nothing but love her. It was a more complicated kind of magic, it toyed with deep-running emotions, it played with fundamental beliefs. She needed a more complicated kind of animal, a more twisted and complex mind.

The woman she chose was friendless, a servant girl who did laundry and swept floors, who she assumed no one would miss. The girl was not bright enough to realize that Altair's smile was false, that promises spilled that easily could never in a million years be true. My mother did not tell me how she coaxed the girl back to her chambers, even less so how she managed to cut her, to kill her, and I do not want to imagine. But she was always convincing, anyone who has met her has found it difficult not to believe her. There is something sweet and honest in her smile, if not in her eyes.

She was mistaken, interrupted. Someone came creeping into her room while she was still halfway through the incantation, and broke her concentration with a scream, a shriek. It woke the entire house, brought servants and priests running, to stare wide-eyed at the careful arrangement of the body and the complicated symbols drawn on the ground.

The punishment for magic is heavy. The punishment for murder is heavy. The two together were treated with such shock and hatred that she never even had a true trial - not that she could have explained, or talked her way out of it, not when she was found with blood coated hands and crimson splattered clothing.

She was only fifteen when they sentenced her to exile, when they put her under the knife to remove the dark wings that were very much a part of her. When they packed her up in a carriage and shipped her out into the wildness, abandoned her in the middle of a familiar expanse of forest to find her own way, back still wounded and aching, heart broken and frustrated. When she dropped the name 'Altair' and began calling herself 'Two-Crescent,' a tribute to the twin scars on her shoulder blades.

They assumed that she would never be seen again, that they had taken care of her as neatly as they could. They should have killed her, should have finished the job, instead of leaving it to the wild animals and the weather. They should have assumed that she was strong enough to find her way out of that forest and back to civilization. They had taught her to blend in, and she had learned well.

The worst part was her spell had failed, and no one had ever loved her.